1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to credit cards; and, more particularly, to sales transactions conducted by point-of-sale devices.
2. Related Art
Credit cards and debit cards are used by a lot of people to conduct sales transactions. A typical person has a plurality of credit cards, ATM accounts, debit cards, checking accounts, SmartCards, charge cards, etc. Such a person would often carry these cards with him/her, typically in a wallet. These cards are likely to be lost, causing a lot of worry and potentially financial trouble, if the person were to lose the purse or wallet. A person is also likely to have savings and checking bank accounts at multiple banks, and managing all those accounts is not easy. Knowing which of those accounts has sufficient balance or credit for a sales transaction takes a lot of lookup, account balancing and tracking. Some people have lines of credit at multiple banks and these have to be managed carefully. Department store credit cards are also used by some people, thereby making it very difficult to manages all of those cards.
Purses and wallets become very fat and heavy due to the plethora of cards a person is likely to carry. A lost or stolen wallet requires a complex process of cancellation of all of ones cards. Often this occurs when traveling and telephone numbers of all card issuers is not available, difficult to track down, and costly from a PSTN long distance perspective. Also a missing one of such plurality of cards often goes unnoticed.
Lost cards often result from failing to retrieve a card from a vendor, such as a sales clerk at a store. The vendor is not capable of contacting the card holder, and must wait to see if the card holder returns.
Sometimes, when a customer attempts to buy an item at a store using a credit card, the attempted sales transaction is rejected or denied due to insufficient funds, causing embarrassment to the customer. This occurs even when the user has other credit cards with sufficient credit. Such an event when a credit card based transaction fails, for any reason, is not only inconvenient but also a cause of embarrassment. Such embarrassment can also occur due to several reasons, such as a downed network (including problems with the vendor's equipment to the card processor), forgotten payment, or insufficient credit, etc.
Quite often, due to the plethora of bank and other accounts a person possesses, the person finds it very difficulty to track the balance and activity of those cards, thereby experiencing delayed payments and unpaid bills. Managing multiple credit cards, debit cards, etc., is therefore a lot of work with the potential of unpaid bills and potential embarrassment during sales transactions at stores.
These and other limitations and deficiencies associated with the related art may be more fully appreciated by those skilled in the art after comparing such related art with various aspects of the present invention as set forth herein with reference to the figures.